So how much do you think predictability is feeding into this sense that Washington may be a greater threat these days than Beijing?

Yeah, well, maybe I could give your viewers a bit of a sense of some of this polling, just so you've got a bit of context.

This is polling that's been done by the Asia New Zealand Foundation, a non-profit organization in New Zealand now for about three decades.

So it's a really interesting longitudinal survey of how New Zealanders feel about different countries in the region.

And I guess what we have seen in New Zealand over the last five or six years in particular is that feelings of warmth towards China have dropped.

And there's probably a number of different reasons for that, but they're reasons that play out across a number of liberal democracies, Australia as well.

They're everything from China's actions in the South China Sea, the national security law in Hong Kong, the treatment of the Uyghurs, issues around foreign interference.

So with all this going on with the competition for influence in your neighborhood, growing mistrust of both China and the United States, a very active Australian policy now in the Pacific, what is New Zealand's foreign policy as regards to the region and perhaps beyond?

How does New Zealand's, uh, defense spending rack up against countries, for instance, like Australia or even our other Five Eyes partners?

Australia's spending now, uh, higher than 2%, I think around 2.2%, and has talked about going, uh, to 3% and possibly even further.

Canada, for example, has b- historically [laughs] been another fairly low spender on defense, although it in the last, um, year under new Prime Minister Carney has a- announced, um, that it will meet the NATO, the new NATO goal of 3.5% on, on sort of core defense spending over a, over an extended period of time.

At one level, you know, these are, um, they're kinda clunky numbers.

2%, uh, you know, it, it, its origins used to be back in the NATO days that that was a sort of a, a target for, for what NATO countries, um, should spend.

Now the expectation of NATO, NATO members is that it's 3.5%, plus another up to 5% if you include sort of security-related infrastructure.

So the two and a half thing, it, it's, it, it's a kind of a guide in some ways in the sense of course if your economy shrinks [laughs], you can get a lower number will get you to 2% faster.

So are we putting the money in the right places right now?